Nasutoceratops

Nasutoceratops titusi (nas·u·to·cer·a·tops) or "big-nose, horn-face," is named for its most significant features:

the two enormous horns protruding from its head and its prodigious snout. It the first from the group of short-frilled, horned dinosaurs to have been found in the American south, revising previous theories that those dinosaurs lived only in the north.

Description

Nasutoceratops' nose is the biggest of that of any known dinosaur in the ceratopsian family, to which this new species belongs. But the part of the nose that is enlarged is not related to its sense of smell, and scientists are still unsure how its size benefited the animal.

Still, scientists are fairly confident that the humongous horns – the largest in the family in relative terms, as the Nasutoceratops' five-foot-long head is about half the size of that of other dinosaurs in the group – were used for mating purposes.

Like other dinosaurs in the triceratops family, the quadrupedal herbivore, which measured about 15 feet and weighed some 2 tons, has a frill on its head, like a misshapen halo backlighting its face.

In addition to adding a bizarre new creature to the dinosaur roster, the find also adds new evidence to the idea that the western edge of what is now the United States and Canada was once home to two contemporaneous communities of dinosaurs.